No hard evidence
From Brendan O'Neill Sir: Ann Clwyd claims to have discovered further evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime used an 'industrial' shredding machine to execute prisoners (Letters, 10 April). However, all she really has is yet more hearsay — apparently, Iraqi prisoners told a senior officer of the Coalition who told Clwyd that there was a shredding machine in one of Saddann's prisons.
That 'the head of the British Mission in Baghdad witnessed this conversation' between Clwyd and the officer does not, I'm afraid, make it any more reliable as evidence for a human shredding machine. Clwyd still has no hard evidence to substantiate her claim that the Baathists fed dissidents 'feet first' into a shredder and later put their remains into 'plastic bags' so they could be used as 'fish food', as she claimed on the eve of war, and on the day MPs debated the war in the House of Commons, in March last year.
On 9 April this year, Clwyd wrote a short piece in the Guardian in which she celebrated some of the positive things that have happened since the end of the war, including the training of a new generation of Iraqi journalists. Apparently Clwyd advised them that 'a good journalist must ask awkward questions of politicians'. In my original piece on the shredder, I asked some awkward questions of Clwyd, and she still has not given satisfactory answers.
Brendan O'Neill I Wembley, Middlesex
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